“Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.” Most people go through life not really getting any smarter. Why? They simply won’t do the work required. It’s easy to come home, sit on the couch, watch TV and zone out until bed time rolls around. But that’s not really going to help you get smarter. Sure you can go into the office the next day and discuss the details of last night’s episode of Mad Men or Game of Thrones. And, yes, you know what happened on Survivor. But that’s not knowledge accumulation, it’s a mind-numbing sedative. But you can acquire knowledge if you want it. In fact there is a simple formula, which if followed is almost certain to make you smarter over time. Simple but not easy. It involves a lot of hard work. We’ll call it the Buffett formula, named after Warren Buffett and his longtime business partner at Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger. These two are an extraordinary combination of minds. They are also learning machines. “I can see, he can hear. We make a great combination.” — We can learn a lot from them. They didn’t get smart because they are both billionaires. No, in fact they became billionaires, in part, because they are smart. More importantly, they keep getting smarter. And it turns out that they have a lot to say on the subject. Warren Buffett spends 80% of his day reading. Click To TweetHow to get smarter Read. A lot. Warren Buffett says, “I just sit in my office and read all day.” What does that mean? He estimates that he spends 80% of his working day reading and thinking. “You could hardly find a partnership in which two people settle on reading more hours of the day than in ours,” Charlie Munger commented. When asked how to get smarter, Buffett once held up stacks of paper and said “read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge builds up, like compound interest.” All of us can build our knowledge but most of us won’t put in the effort. One person who took Buffett’s advice, Todd Combs, now works for the legendary investor. After hearing Buffett talk he started keeping track of what he read and how many pages he was reading. The Omaha World-Herald writes:
But how you read matters too. You need to be critical and always thinking. You need to do the mental work required to hold an opinion. In Working tougher: Why Great Partnerships Succeed Buffett comments to author Michael Eisner:
Continuous learning Eisner continues:
It doesn’t work how you think it works. If you’re thinking they sit in front of a computer all day obsessing over numbers and figures? You’d be dead wrong.
Munger sees his knowledge accumulation as an acquired, rather than natural, genius. And he’d give all the credit to the studying he does. “Neither Warren nor I is smart enough to make the decisions with no time to think,” Munger once told a reporter. “We make actual decisions very rapidly, but that’s because we’ve spent so much time preparing ourselves by quietly sitting and reading and thinking.” How can you find time to read? Finding the time to read is easier than you think. One way to help make that happen is to carve an hour out of your day just for yourself. In an interview he gave for his authorized biography The Snowball, Buffett told the story:
It’s important to think about the opportunity cost of this hour. On one hand you can check twitter, read some online news, and reply to a few emails while pretending to finish the memo that is supposed to be the focus of your attention. On the other hand, you can dedicate the time to improving yourself. In the short term, you’re better off with the dopamine laced rush of email and twitter while multitasking. In the long term, the investment in learning something new and improving yourself goes further. “I have always wanted to improve what I do,“ Munger comments “even if it reduces my income in any given year. And I always set aside time so I can play my own self-amusement and improvement game.” Reading is only part of the equation. But reading isn’t enough. Charlie Munger offers:
Commenting on what it means to have knowledge, in How To Read A Book, Mortimer Adler writes: “The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.” Can you explain what you know to someone else? Try it. Pick an idea you think you have a grasp of and write it out on a sheet of paper as if you were explaining it to someone else. (see The Feynman Technique and here, if you want to improve retention.) Nature or Nurture? If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. Click To TweetAnother way to get smarter, outside of reading, is to surround yourself with people who are not afraid to challenge your ideas. “Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.” — Charlie Munger |
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来自: luckyjohn97 > 《人生哲理》